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Charging that northern propagandists distorted or even fabricated stories of “outrages” in the South, some whites chose not to believe any of them, while others ascribed them to lower-class whites or defended them as a proper response to black impudence and lawlessness. “Don’t you believe your ‘eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses’ of our cruelty,” a prominent North Carolina woman advised her friend in Connecticut. “Exceptional cases there are no doubt, as in everything, but believe me, nine hundred and ninety in every thousand of our people are kindly disposed to them, and if they behave themselves will befriend them.” It was grossly unfair to the South, an irate planter observed, for newspaper reporters to view “solitary instances” of brutality as typical of “the condition of the niggers and the disposition of the whites.” After all, he added, if “some impudent darkey, who deserves it, gets a knock on the head,” that did not mean “that every nigger in the South is in danger of being killed.” With absolute confidence, a magistrate in South Carolina insisted that blacks faced no danger to their lives unless they themselves provoked it.123

Even allowing for some exaggeration in the news accounts of white “atrocities,” the number of assaults and murders never reported, whether because of fear of retaliation or the disappearance of the victims, approximated or exceeded those later found to be unfounded or distorted. Without intending to do so, a Georgia farmer suggested the difficulty in accurately measuring the full extent of white violence.

A heap of’em [freedmen] out in my country get into the swamps and get lost. I don’t know as it’s true, but I’ve heard that there’s men out there that haven’t got anything else to do, and if you mention any nigger to ’em, and give ’em twelve dollars, the nigger’s sure to be lost in a very few days.

I know four right here in Barnwell that have been drowned some way within the last two months. Niggers never were so careless before. They go into the swamps and nobody can find out anything about ’em till by-and-bye they’re seen floating down the river. Going to the coast, I reckon; that’s where they’re fond of going.

After reporting the brutal rape of a black woman, in which the attackers had vowed vengeance on the families of men who had served in the “God damned Yankee army,” the black newspaper in Savannah declared that all too often such reports were suppressed, lest they incriminate the entire white population and “make capital” for the Radicals. “This is a miserable plea,” the editor wrote, “for shielding criminals and thwarting the demands of justice.” Nor could whites explain away the violence by placing the onus on the so-called dregs of the white population. To do so would have slighted some of the best families and demeaned their contribution to the maintenance of racial solidarity. Although “gentlemen” and “ladies” tended to deplore the excesses, many of them assumed an indifference that came close to approval or sympathy. No matter how hard some whites claimed to have tried, it remained difficult for them to view the murder of a black person as comparable to the murder of a white. The wave of postwar violence in Wilkes County, Georgia, for example, prompted considerable outrage among “the more respectable class” of whites and resulted in a protest meeting. “This class is ashamed of such outrages,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer observed, “but it does not prevent them, and it does not take them to heart; and I could name a dozen cases of murder committed on the colored people by young men of these first families.”124

When violence reached the dimensions of race war, few could remain indifferent. Emancipation introduced into the South a phenomenon already well known to Northerners—the race riot. Appropriately, the first such outbreaks—in Charleston and Norfolk in 1865—pitted white Union soldiers against black soldiers and freedmen. By 1867, however, native whites had fought freedmen in the streets